Context & Review (Story) : Second Wind

For this session, we were tasked with choosing a short video which dealt with 'story' in an interesting way, which we would then critique, and present our findings to the group.

Working with Mark Haldane, we decided to use 'Second Wind' (by Ian Worrel) as our short film. According to the creator, 'Second Wind' was created using 2D traditional animation, aswell as being coloured using Photoshop and composited in After Effects. The video can be seen below;

This short film tells the story of a man and his giant cat - loyal companions. They do everything together - travel, eat, sleep and play. Whilst playing together, the man enters a cave and finds a small glowing sprite. He ends up playing ball with this new-found friend, upsetting the cat. The cat then becomes angry towards the sprite and squashes it beneath a giant paw. The sprite is then resurrected but glows red instead of blue and tries to attack the cat, at which point the man sacrifices himself. We are then witness to a 'dream scene' where the man is revived, but with a windmill attached to his back - the cat can then blow on this to keep the man alive, bringing them together once again.

The presentation of this piece was excellent. Characters, although simple, were engaging and well designed. The cat's emotions were 'on show' throughout, creating a strong feeling of empathy - this was particularly important as there was no dialogue. This simplicity was carried throughout the visual style, creating something unique and colourful, but dark and mysterious at the same time (the subject matter of the story being told).

After watching the short film, we discussed the content, and decided that Second Wind was a tale of many things; companionship, loyalty, new friendship, perception of betrayal, jealousy and conflict. Less importantly, we also realised it was also about 'cool eyebrows, football and a bad-ass cat' - well, thats what we thought anyway.

When trying to interpret this story, we came up with several ideas;

• By using a giant cat, we felt that a fantasy/mythical setting was created - this created a 'lighter' atmosphere, and allowed for a small amount of humour despite the seriousness of the story being told.
• The importance of the cat's jealousy/anger - did this create the situation? Without these emotions the sprite would probably not have been killed, and the events that followed would have been very different.
• The idea of shared redemption - the man saved the cat despite being more focused on his new friend, and the cat saved the man becoming his life-support.
• A controversial idea which presented the cat as selfish - the cat struggled to feed itself and relied on the man to look after it. Was the cat keeping the man alive because it needed him? Also, did the cat want the necessity of keeping him alive to make sure the man did not 'stray' again?

An important visual feature to note was the use of colour. Throughout the early stages of the animation, there was a green atmosphere. This turned to blue when the man entered the cave, and to red when the cat 'fought' the sprite. It finally returned to green as the conflict was resolved - this was a great way of signposting the  different stages of the story.

Overall, we found that this short animation was well-received and provided a good opportunity for discussion amongst the group. Mark also added a blog entry discussing 'Second Wind', and this can be found here.

For anyone interested in more information on 'Second Wind', the creator has two blog posts which contain artwork generated during production; found here and here.